Due to the Anyone Can Die nature of the show and quickly moving plots, only spoilers from the current/most recent season will be spoiled out to prevent entire pages of whited out text. These spoiler tags will be removed upon the debut of the following season, and the character bios will be updated then as well. If you have not seen the first six seasons read at your own risk!

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In General

A family living in King County, Georgia. Throughout the show, their lives dramatically changes, starting with Rick, the head of the family, getting shot and the Zombie Apocalypse that follows.

Despite a huge strain in their marriage, Rick is greatly crushed after Lori's death.

Starting the Season 3 finale, Carl repeatedly tells Rick that he is weak and couldn't protect anyone. After the prison's fall in Season 4, he even tells Rick that he could die because he (Carl) can take care of himself. After thinking that Rick has turned, Carl breaks down and couldn't kill his father.

Lori Grimes

Lori is Rick's wife, who knew he was in the hospital. Shane went back for him, honestly believed him dead, and returned to camp to regretfully inform Lori. Lori and Shane became an item until Rick turned up alive at the camp thanks to Glenn. Her relationship with both Rick and Shane has soured after that, as her affair was revealed and she discovered she was pregnant. She is killed early in Season 3, when Maggie has to perform an emergency C-section to save the baby and Carl is forced to shoot her in the head to prevent reanimation.

Action Survivor: Making up for her stupidity in "Nebraska", Lori has a Let's Get Dangerous! moment right after her car crash. Still suffering from shock, she stabs a walker clambering into the car through the eye with a torn-off piece of the car, and then smacks another over the head with a hub cap before fetching her gun from the car and headshotting it.

Age Lift: Lori is 27 at the start of the comics. She's in her mid-thirties in this one.

Break the Cutie: She was determined to prevent this from happening to Carl, but eventually has to accept that Carl must be exposed to the horrors of the world if he is ever going to survive it.

Break the Haughty: Lori is rather self-righteous for the first two seasons of the show, given her being the "First Lady" of the group and often ordering the others around. She also dithers when it comes to resolving the Love Triangle between her and Rick and Shane, and later is enraged when Rick reveals he killed Shane in self-defense and refuses to let her come near him. This destroys their relationship, and Lori is practically begging to make amends with Rick, and admits that she feels she deserves to have been laid low.

Character Death: Lori dies in season 3, when she tells Maggie to perform a Cesarean section on her so Judith can be born, even knowing it will kill her.

The Chick: Lori is the least likely of the group to use weapons and instead relies mostly on others to protect herself. She can fight, if she must, though.

The Conscience: One of the most vocal members of the group to criticize morally-questionable actions.

Cruel and Unusual Death: Suffers through several minutes of highly painful labor, and has Maggie slice her stomach open without any form of anesthetic before she finally passes out, and is put down by Carl.

Death by Adaptation: In the comics, Lori died at the very end of the prison arc instead of near the beginning of it.

Death by Childbirth: Although the C-section by Maggie (without anesthesia) is the immediate cause, a labor proceeding exactly like Carl's necessitating said operation ultimately did, as she would have died without it.

Does Not Like Guns: Seems to be why she rarely fights herself and instead prefers to have others protect her. She even tries to argue against it when Rick and Shane want to teach her son Carl to use a gun, despite the fact it's the most viable option for self-defense he has in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse.

Heroic Sacrifice: When trapped in the boiler room while the prison being overrun by walkers and the stress causing her to be in labor, she decides for Maggie to perform makeshift C-section with a knife so that her child would survive, knowing she would die.

Hypocrite: She chews out Rick for not telling her that Hershel was going to kick them off of the farm, while she doesn't tell Rick that she's pregnant until he finds her morning after pills. Rick calls her out on this and she admits to it herself.

Mama Bear: Otis is likely lucky to have died before he met Lori and suffered her wrath for shooting Carl. She's also ready to brave a walker invasion of the farm to go hunt down her missing son, and is only talked out of it by Carol.

Pregnant Badass: Lori's stamina is something to be admired considering she was able to keep up with the group for the entirety of her pregnancy. Even when she's days from giving birth, she still is quite handy with a gun as seen during the taking of the prison.

Sacrificial Lion: The major casualty of Season 3, whose passing changes Rick and Carl forever and leaves them with Judith.

Secret Relationship: What she thought her relationship with Shane was. Turned out Dale, Daryl, and Andrea had all figured it out, and Rick caught on pretty quickly to what had happened between her and Shane while they thought he was dead.

Stay in the Kitchen: She apparently literally believes this is what the women should be doing during the Zombie Apocalypse, and is annoyed with Andrea for wanting to protect the camp. Andrea is understandably incredulous and pissed off upon being told this. Lori rationalizes that "we are trying to create a world worth living in", meaning she values the normality and comfort of mundane household chores over bloodshed and fighting.

Who's Your Daddy?: Lori understandably isn't sure if the baby she's carrying was fathered by Rick or Shane. In Season 7, Rick is certain that it's Shane's child.

Woman in White: In Rick's hallucinations during "The Suicide King" and "Home".

Your Cheating Heart: Subverted. She slept with Shane under the assumption that Rick was dead. The moment she realizes Rick was alive she walks away from Shane without looking back, and would never have actually cheated on Rick.

Carl

Carl Grimes

"Everything's food for something else."

Portrayed by: Chandler Riggs

"Are we safe now, Dad?"

Carl is Rick and Lori's son. In Rick's absence, he has come to regard Shane as something of a father figure. This causes no small amount of friction once Rick returns, as Carl loves his dad but still loves Shane and looks up to him. As the show has progressed, the Zombie Apocalypse has had an increasingly damaging effect on Carl's mind and personality, as he is forced to fight walkers to survive and other threats constantly surround his family and the group. Nothing breaks Carl more than the tragic death of his mother in childbirth, even more so considering he's forced to put her down so she won't reanimate, and he ends up naming his new baby sister Judith.

After an attempt by Rick to save his humanity has mixed results, Carl begins to feel that he no longer needs his father, but ends up relenting when he realizes that he can't make it on his own. The bond between father and son turned out to have been repaired just in time, as Rick resorted to drastic measures to save Carl from a horrific near-rape experience. Though Carl's satisfaction at his assailant's death worried him, he was able to recover with the help of his new surrogate mother figure Michonne.

Following this, Carl has done a rebound, and now his first instinct is to help people, even after encounters with rapists and cannibals. After the group reaches Alexandria, Carl is torn between his desire to develop normal relationships with others his age and his fear that living in the comfort of the safe-zone will make him weak. However, the chief threat to Carl in Alexandria emerges in Ron Anderson, who pins his rage over his father's death on him. Carl ultimately loses an eye thanks to Ron's final murderous, insane rampage during the Battle of Alexandria. Carl is saved by Denise, and goes on to approve of his father's relationship with Michonne.

A Day in the Limelight: The mid-season premiere 'After', which focuses on Carl and Michonne. Carl has to fend for himself in a suburb after the prison is overrun and Rick succumbs to his injuries from the Governor. 'Sing Me a Song' is also very Carl-centric, as he interacts with Negan following a failed assassination attempt.

Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Carl's comic counterpart wasn't subjected to seeing his childhood friend Sophia die, nor having to shoot his dead mother so she won't reanimate. In contrast though, he so far has not had to go through the death of his little sister.

Adaptational Attractiveness: His Eye Scream in the show is decidedly less grotesque than in the comics, as the side of his head remains largely intact compared to the gaping hole he sustains in the latter.

Adaptational Heroism: Despite his "Kill or be killed" attitude from Season 3 and the first half of Season 4, by Season 5 he has become far nicer than his comic book counterpart, who remains a Creepy Child by this time of the storyline, even stating — post Terminus, mind you — that they can still help people.

Big Eater: Even though he's living in a zombie-ridden hellhole, he still eats like a typical teenager. Case in point, he eats 112 ounces of chocolate pudding in one sitting.

Can't Stay Normal: Carl has an awkward time adjusting to Alexandria's peace and ends up hanging out with Enid, who likes to venture around beyond the walls.

Children Forced to Kill: Granted, it's Walkers, but he still has had to learn to take care of himself rather quickly. And then he guns down a teenager in the Woodbury militia who may have been surrendering.

Chronic Hero Syndrome: In Season 5, he vocally advocates helping others, even strangers, and is often the one to lead the charge now that he's trained to fight.

Corrupt the Cutie: Shows signs of this in "Judge, Jury, Executioner", where he at one point entertains himself by throwing rocks at a walker he finds with its feet stuck in the mud at a riverbank, then seems to find a weird sense of pleasure, or at least fascination in Randall's situation. When Rick and Shane are beginning the execution, it's Carl wanting to watch and encouraging Rick to do it that convinces Rick that Dale is right, and that they're starting to lose their humanity. Justified in that he's a young boy and it's the Zombie Apocalypse; he's naturally much quicker to adapt to the far more brutal realities of this new world than older, more experienced people. By the end of Season 3, his experiences have taught him that killing all threats is the best preventive measure. However, by Season 5, he seems to have gotten better and now his first instincts are to people in need.

Creepy Child: Getting to that territory. Justified, again, by the fact he's growing up in a Zombie Apocalypse, meaning he's developing a mindset that's quite alien to more normal civilized people. Lampshaded in Season 2 where it's noted that Carl is starting to spook the older survivors with the way he's beginning to behave. In Season 3, he shoots his dead mother in the head to prevent her from turning and guns down a surrendering Woodbury militiaman. Both with a blank face.

In Season 4, as seen by his interacting with other children, Rick's new pacifism, and Carl's stricter routine of farming and no guns has tempered Carl. Even after his relapse post-prison, by Season 5 he's got a more optimistic philosophy, even stating to Rick they still can help people.

In the Season 6 finale, Negan notices that Carl is the only member of Rick's group besides Abraham not shaking or crying in terror. He pegs him as a future serial killer in the making, implying that the apocalypse has hardened Carl to the point where he doesn't react like a normal child would to gruesome violence. He finally cracks when Glenn is killed at random, and indeed breaks down and cries.

Decomposite Character: Most of his Sanity Slippage arc from the source material was hated in Season 4, and was later incorporated to Carol's own Sanity Slippage arc (even getting one of Carl's significant moments in the comicsnote Killing the sibling who gutted their own sibling to come back as a Walker).

Demoted to Extra: Downplayed. While still a prominent character, Carl has not had as many independent Story Arcs compared to his comic counterpart who, after the prison arc, became the Deuteragonist of the story next to Rick.

Driven to Suicide: Temporarily. When he thinks Rick has become a walker, he gives up and allows him to bite him. Turns out Rick was simply crippled by his injuries and was finding it difficult to talk.

Face Death with Dignity: In the Season 7 finale, he accepts that Negan is about to kill him with Lucille, and though he's clearly sad, he takes calming breaths and closes his eyes, ready for the end if it means the others can keep fighting back. Luckily, Carl is saved when Shiva and the Kingdom come to the rescue.

Forced to Watch: Invoked. Like the rest of the group, he is forced to bear witness to Negan's wrath at the lineup at the end of Season 6 and beginning of Season 7. He later tells Enid that he forced himself to watch the entirety of the affair, and didn't look away when Negan brutally killed Abraham and Glenn, so he would never forget what Negan did to his family. Almost every other member of the group tries their best to not look at the horrors, but Carl forces himself to watch to the bitter end.

Green-Eyed Monster: Downplayed. When Axel flirted with Beth, Carl is glaring at him in an annoyed way.

Happily Adopted: After several seasons and finally making peace with the death of Lori, Carl tells Michonne in "The Next World" that she's become his second mother. He also admits that he loves her and would never allow her to remain a walker, which is why he led an undead Deanna back to Spencer, giving him the opportunity to Mercy Kill his mother like Carl did to Lori. In "Knots Untie", he tells Rick that he's wholly onboard with their new relationship, though he was a bit surprised to learn of it by seeing them half-dressed when emerging from their bedroom.

I Can't Do This by Myself: His attempt to prove he is capable enough to survive without his father ends with him nearly losing his life in an humiliating attempt at killing a single walker. He tearfully apologizes when he realizes he still needs Rick.

I Just Want to Be Badass: More than anything Carl wants to be an asset to the group, to protect his family, and hates being babied.

Intergenerational Friendship: Practically with most of the cast, particularly Michonne. The latter officially shifts by "The Next World" when Carl says that Michonne has more or less become his and Judith's second mother. He is also close to the Greene sisters.

The Load: Understandable as he's an untrained child, but particularly after he gets shot early in Season 2. Averted from Season 3 onward, as he gathers supplies by himself and is trusted as the main guardian of the group when the principal fighters are away.

Manly Tears: Notably when Glenn is being killed by Negan, it's the first time the entire night that he finally breaks down and cries.

Mercy Kill: In Season 3, after Lori appears to have died from having Maggie cutting her stomach open to deliver the baby, he volunteers to shoot her in the head so she won't come back as walker. In "The Next World", Carl tells Michonne that he'd never allow her to remain a walker because he loves her too much.

Nerves of Steel: Is completely calm when Negan holds him on the ground and tells Rick to cut off his arm. This is in direct contrast to Rick, who is in a state of Inelegant Blubbering at this point.

It was not just a one-time-only event, as he continues to display absolutely no fear or apprehension of Negan whatsoever. Negan seems to find this fascinating, as everyone else walks on eggs around him.

Nice Hat: His dad's sheriff hat, which Rick gives to him after he recovers from getting shot.

His taunting of a walker stuck in the mud near the Greene Family farm lead to it breaking out of its trap instead of just sitting there, leaving the walker free to wander out to the farm and kill Dale.

This trope is why he starts showing more sociopathic tendencies in the third season, culminating in killing a member of the Woodbury militia who was surrendering because he'd seen all of his father's attempts at not killing possible threats resulting in disaster for the group.

Oedipus Complex: In "After", Carl abandons an unconscious Rick, claiming he would be fine if his father died and attempts to prove he can make it on his own. He quickly comes back after tasting some Humble Pie.

Out of Focus: He only appears in three episodes in Season 7B, and is relegated to the background for most of his screentime.

Took a Level in Badass: In the Season 3 premiere, he's carrying a gun and joins Rick, Daryl, and T-Dog in raiding a walker-infested house. He is also given the job of point man when the rest of the group is looking over a map, and hunts for the prison infirmary alone, taking out two walkers with no backup. Tyreese recognizes him as 'the man' after Carl saves the former's group then locks them up.

Took a Level in Cynic: Progressively since Season 3, though he seems to be regaining his optimism in Season 5.

Took a Level in Jerkass: He seems to be growing into the role of a teenager who's annoyed with his mom a few years too early. Shifts in later seasons as he matures and becomes a responsible survivor, rarely sassing back at his father or Parental Substitute Michonne.

Awesome Mc Coolname: Before getting her actual name she's dubbed "Lil' Ass-Kicker" by Daryl. Some people in Rick's group keep calling her that, too, and it's the name on her first, cardboard box crib.

Babies Make Everything Better: People tend to calm down and have relatively nice, calm scenes around her, even the biggest and toughest guys like Abraham.

Even Negan seems taken with her, dotes on her, and never makes any threats or even hints of threats towards her. With Negan, it's probably a massive case of Even Evil Has Standards with a tiny dose of having one more way to keep Rick under his thumb.

Justified in that, let's face it, she's a toddler who's barely out of the infant stage, and has no clue what's going on. The cast and crew know full well you can't have violence and yelling around her, as she'll become afraid herself, force them to stop filming, need to be reassured, and it will also make her very apprehensive on the set, as she doesn't know when people will start yelling or why. Note that even extras in zombie make-up are never around her so that she doesn't get afraid (rapid jump cuts are used to give the appearance that zombies are close, when in reality she's nowhere near when they're being filmed). Tellingly, in her first scene with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, when he opened the door and saw her, he immediately gave Lucille to Chandler Riggs before approaching her very calmly and reassuringly in order to pick her up. Morgan and everyone else knows how careful you need to be when working with children.

Dead Guy Junior: Discussed. Carl proposed the names of all the dead and believed to be dead female members before coming up with Judith, the name of his third-grade teacher.

Hair Color Spoiler: Averted, maybe even defied. She's blond, while her mother and her two possible biological fathers are all brunettes. Same goes for her (possibly half) brother. In the comics, she's Shane's child, but TV!Judith shares Rick's blond hair in the comics, which Word of God blatantly said as a hint that she may be Rick's here in the form of Mythology Gag. In Season 7, however, Rick opines that she is in fact Shane's child.

Infant Immortality: Time will tell if this lasts, but so far she has survived being in some very dangerous situations, including the third prison attack, some close calls with walkers, being left alone with Lizzie on several occasions, having a man from Terminus come very close to making good on his threat of snapping her neck, and the walker invasion of Alexandria. The fact that she's outlived her comic book counterpart is likely an example of this trope.

In-Name-Only: Rick believes that she is Shane's child, so she isn't biologically a Grimes.

In-Series Nickname: Daryl still calls her "Lil' Ass-Kicker" from time-to-time, and it's the name on her first, cardboard box crib.

Morality Pet: For Rick's group. In fact, harming her in front of them is like wearing a giant "Kill me" sign around your neck regardless if you're already undead.

Never Found the Body: Rick and Carl believe her to be dead after they only found blood in her carrier during the chaos toward the end of "Too Far Gone". In "Inmates", she is shown to have survived thanks to Tyreese saving her. In Season 5's "No Sanctuary", father and daughter are finally reunited after Carol saves the group from Terminus and leads them back to the cabin where Tyreese was staying with Judith.

Promotion to Parent: The entire group has this enforced upon them almost immediately from her birth, since at the time Rick was grieving the loss of her mother. Her most prominent non-Grimes caregivers have been Hershel, Beth, Carol, and Tyreese. Michonne has also stepped up to the plate as an adoptive mother to both Judith and Carl since Season 4.

Related in the Adaptation: Word of God implies that she is Rick's child in the TV continuity, not Shane's. Not that it would stop Rick from loving her as his own, anyways. Rick then outright states in Season 7 that he believes Judith is Shane's, but followed it up with the the previous reason.

Spared by the Adaptation: She died along with Lori in the comics, which if the show had followed the source material's timeline, would have been either Season 3 or 4. She is still alive as of Season 7.

Who's Your Daddy?: It was Shane in the comicbook. Rick doesn't seem to care either way in the show and fully considers Judith to be his daughter, regardless of her genetics. He's literally in tears when they're reunited in "No Sanctuary". In Season 7, Rick admits to Michonne that he firmly believes that Shane was her biological father.

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